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Comment by wruza | Hacker News Reader

This part will likely confuse people who are not familiar with shell and will create a bunch of thousands "_" files worldwide.

Quick explanation:

  >_ echo hello

or equivalently:

  echo hello >_

when executed in a shell creates a file named "_" with contents of "hello". Author seems to use ">_" as a terminal icon, but many will copy it as part of a command.

That is, if I'm not missing anything clever here.

Upd: copy button doesn't copy the >_ part, so the "icon" theory seems to be correct.

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A ‘trick’ for fancy prompts containing information is to give them the form,

    : all the stuff;

As long as ‘all the stuff’ is parseable as shell words (which you can ensure by quoting with printf '%q' if there's doubt), then you can copy and paste entire lines.

The trivial copyable prompt would be

:;

Note that this isn't guaranteed to be a no-op for arbitrary "all the stuff". Specifically it won't work for commands involving pipes, or commands involving command substitution / process substitution. That is:

    : bar "$(foo)"
    : bar <(foo)
    : < <(foo) bar
    : bar | foo

will all still execute `foo`

That's why I mentioned quoting.

Thank you for this!! TIL. Immediately adopting. Now wishing everyone else knew this too.

I read about this long ago, possibly in the Blit era, possibly in ;login: (other order, other reasons). It's old lore, but not widely known, so I try to mention in when the subject of prompts comes up.

Agreed, including the ">_" prompt in the command line isn't really helpful. The copy icon works, it's extra unnecessary cognitive overhead. Also, ">_" is an unusual prompt, I don't know what distro ships with that by default.

">" is the prompt on MS-DOS, and "_" is the cursor.

Somehow this has resulted in ">" or ">_" being the terminal "icon" even in unixy parts of the world; looking at the generic "utilities-terminal" icon: the default theme for Gnome 3 ("Adwaita") uses ">_" in the icon, the default theme for KDE ("Breeze") uses ">", and the runner-up ("Oxygen", which also comes bundled with KDE), also uses ">_".

That's unfortunate, because on Linux the shells tend to use ">" for a continuation prompt, where you can not enter complete commands.

Also, the SSH app on Chromebooks.

Author of linuxcommandlibrary.com here.

You are 100% right. That was quite dump. I think I got the idea from the SSH icon I used in the basics page.

Replaced ">_" with "$". Looks much better and I also updated some of the design and content on the site. Update is live.

the author should hide that "> _" by including it as a CSS :before or :after content, which by definition is not selectable.

Author of linuxcommandlibrary.com here.

I did a quick fix and replaced ">_" with "$". I will dig into CSS :before during the next update. Thanks for the idea.

Yes, I wonder what benefit there is to include `>_` as the prompt. The obvious drawback is confusing some poor souls. Also it's ugly, who would want to use `>_` as their prompt?

Am I some sort of weirdo because I don't recall seeing >_ used before as a prompt?

_ is the blinking cursor. Prompt is just >

But it doesn't blink.... > is kind of and odd prompt as well.

That is a default in some current and old Unix systems, as well as the tcsh shell.

I think it is from the dos/windows world.

  A:\>_

    Acorn Electron
    BASIC
    >_

or whatever, it's a standard prompt if you're old enough!

It could have at least a less prominent color. And it could be added with a `::before` pseudo-element so you can't select it (just for decoration). Might be also annoying for screen readers without `aria-hidden`.

also it’s called a shell prompt for what it’s worth.

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